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Harmless by James Grainger: Review

Pacy tale exploring what it means to be a man in an urban environment takes us into a forested heart of darkness.

(Raffi Anderian illustration)

James Grainger, author of Harmless. (Jenna Marie Wakani)

Harmless, James Grainger, McClelland & Stewart, 288 pages, $22.

By John FreemanSpecial to the Star

Sat., May 9, 2015

Our current era of self-conscious masculinity — of mani-pedis and so-called metrosexuals — is hardly new.

Take a detour into any museum’s Renaissance wing and you’ll see that a man’s anxiety about his manhood is as old as the codpiece. Still, the age old question — of what makes a man — remains a pressing one, and it takes on a contemporary sharpness in James Grainger’s pacy debut novel, Harmless.

Here is how a certain type of urban fellow feels today — being downwardly mobile when others are getting astonishingly rich, feeling wimpy around men who have retained the practical skills of building and fighting.

Joseph, the novel’s acidly envious hero, stews in such issues. He is narrow-shouldered and formerly handsome. He struggles with the urge to quote himself fatuously. Like the book’s author, he writes on the arts. In truth, he’s barely holding it together.

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Set over a day and a night on a remote Canadian farm, the book chronicles a weekend retreat that explodes when these anxieties burst into the open. Grainger cleverly litters the opening pages with omens of doom, as the parties turn up for this country idle — Joseph’s former lover, her husband Alex, an ex-addict. All their kids.

Joseph arrives hungover and without his BlackBerry, oozing booze and prepared for attacks about his fathering skills. Deprived of this tether to a world where he is important, he flails and seethes. He wages a pathetic guerrilla war against his old rival Alex, flirting openly with his wife.

Alex is Joseph’s opposite. A filmmaker who retreated to the woods, he builds furniture now, can hold a gun without thinking, “I’m holding a gun,” and doesn’t jealously patrol his turf. He seems entirely at home in his own skin.

Narrating in a close third person voice, Grainger reveals a man measuring himself against his rival: Joseph doesn’t have Alex’s shoulders, while of another man Joseph observes that at least the guy had the commitment to truly give in to a bohemian life. (In other words, he became a drug addict.)

The opening third of Harmless layers these petty intrigues against a rising sense of tension. The woods are out there, lurking with danger. Alex talks of a drug grow-op in the woods and the ex-war vets who’ve planted themselves there. He worries they’re settling in.

In the novel’s second half, something occurs in which these two worlds — the domesticated farm and the wilds around it — are brought together. You can learn this development on the book’s back cover, which seems a shame, as it ought to come as a surprise.

One of the bigger surprises about Harmless, though, is that Grainger makes the leap from a tidy novel of domestic manners to an urgent tale of action rather seamlessly. All too often in novels that begin this way, the moment the book crosses over it turns false and tinny.

Grainger sets up his meditation on masculinity so neatly that we follow him willingly into an unlikely, but symbolically potent scenario. Faces painted, torches raises, Joseph and Alex head into the woods to protect the farm.

The author of a prior collection of short stories, Grainger moves the action from scene to scene with a cinematic pulse. The latter half of the book takes place almost entirely in this forest, on a trek that resembles a domesticated version of Robert Stone’s The Dog Soldiers — his classic novel about Vietnam.

The comparison might seem obscure, but in a world where fighting so often happens over there, for a large — very large — proportion of men, the instinct to fight and protect become entirely personal, its only outlet domestic.

And yet, as Grainger reminds in Harmless, there is no such thing as a harmless instinct, especially when it’s let out into the open. There can be no protection without an edge of violence. And lurking within fatherly pride there often lies a seed of vanity.

Harmless does not arrive at these observations the easy way. They emerge from the core of Joseph’s character. In this fashion, Harmless draws together two genres rarely seen in the same post code: the garden party and the heart of darkness tale.

Perhaps this truly is a sign of our times. A middle class man might have an atavistic urge to paint his face, retreat to the woods and go rogue. Fight for his daughter, his land. But first he’d like a tasty microbrew to whet his appetite.

John Freeman is the author of How to Read a Novel and editor of Freeman’s, a literary biannual forthcoming in October.

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